The Best of IMDb’s Beloved Foreign Posters for Horror Movies

Recently, IMDb shared their favorite foreign posters for horror movies. Even people with a casual interest in movie posters are probably aware that the foreign version of a movie poster are, if nothing else, often weirder and more curious than what we end up with stateside. I wouldn’t say that the Hungarian poster for Star Wars is better than the classic original, for instance, but it’s certainly memorable in its own very different way.

While IMDb’s list is fun and interesting, I’m pretty sure that the number of posters selected is entirely arbitrary. There are plenty of great choices here, but the list could probably stand some trimming. Some of the posters are almost identical to the original Hollywood poster, with the biggest difference being the language for the title, tagline and credits. Some are pretty good, but just didn’t stand out to me, or just didn’t strike me as terribly effective horror movie posters. And while the syntactically ambiguous “Foreign Horror Movie Posters We Love” title leaves the IMDb list open to include posters for foreign-horror movies, I think it’s more interesting (or at least consistent) to just look at the foreign-version of posters for “non-foreign” (aka, U.S. and English) horror flicks.

As a poster / cover-art dilettante and unknown horror author who very infrequently blogs about the subject of horror, I’m surely the ideal person to undertake the aforementioned trimming. Below you will find one man’s subjective list of what’s best from an already subjective larger list of what’s best. 1

The IMDB list doesn’t specify the country for each poster. I went out of the way to do some strenuous 5-second-Google-research for each poster in the gallery below, but I can’t promise that the results are accurate.

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People say things like, “The rule is that you never show the devil.” I’ve heard that. An actress lectured me on that once. But if you have a good-looking devil, and it looks convincing—well, yes, you show it! You kidding? It’ll scare the shit out of the audience. If you have a stupid devil, then you don’t show it.